A growth of production in various industries and increased requirements to the quality of products, as well as an increase in labour productivity, improvement of labour conditions in the manufactures using toxic products result in the need to provide new high-performance filters eliminating manual labour.
Known in the art is a filter (U.S. Pat. No. 3,447,684, Cl. 210-108 of June 3, 1969) having two alternately operating filtering elements and a pilot valve for automatically switching over the supply of filtered fluid. When the filter is contaminated, a pressure difference sensor operates to control a pilot valve switching mechanism. The pilot valve returns a portion of the outflowing filtrate for regenerating the filtering element by the reverse flow.
Known in the art is a filter manufactured by "AMF Cuno Incorporated" for filtering liquids and gases through throw-away thin-walled filtering cartridges having a pre-set pore size. The cartridges are placed in tightly sealed compartments or a number of compartments interconnected by a distribution device. During filtering, a fluid being cleaned passes through the walls of the cartridge to be filtered, and contaminants remain in the cartridge walls. As the particles accumulate, the resistance offered by the cartridge increases and the throughput capacity of the filter decreases. To maintain optimum throughput capacity of the filter, the flow of a product being cleaned is switched over to another compartment containing new cartridges, and the filtering cartridges are replaced manually in the disconnected compartment.
"AMF-Cuno" manufactures filters having one, two, three, nine, eighteen, forty two and two hundred fifty six cartridges. The filters comprise a casing having a removable cover plate and perforated guides in the form of tubes for fixing the cartridges and for removal of filtrate.
The filter has a low productivity owing to the need in manual operations of disassembly of the filter, replacement of cartridges and assembly of the filter. Much time being spent for replacement of cartridges, the number of concurrently operating filtering cartridges should be increased. Non-uniform washing of cartridges in multicartridge filters results in losses of product being filtered. In addition, sanitary conditions are not complied with during disassembly and replacement of cartridges.